Donald Abenheim
Research Fellow

Expertise: History of United States war and politics for the era since the mid-1970s; wars of ideology, paramilitary organizations and genocide in the twentieth century

Donald Abenheim is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

He is an historian of war and politics with considerable experience in United States military institutions beginning in the mid-1970s.

Abenheim was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution from 1988 until 2004.

He joined the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) faculty in 1985. He was academic associate (i.e., director of graduate studies) for strategic studies in the Department of National Security Affairs from 2000 until 2004, where he was responsible for the oversight of some eighty graduate students from the United States and thirty from allied and friendly nations.

He helped to create the Center for Civil Military Relations (CCMR) at NPS in 1993 and led its successful U.S. Department of State/Expanded International Education and Training European programs until 2000.

He presently represents CCMR to the Consortium of NATO and Partnership for Peace Defense Academies. He was instrumental in the effort that in 2004 resulted in NPS's becoming the NATO "Partnership for Peace" training center for the United States among the twenty-six NATO allies.

From 1994 until 2000, he organized seminars in the democratic civil-military relations of NATO enlargement at NATO headquarters and in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, Austria, and Georgia for ministries of defense amid the process of reform from the Soviet system of civil-military relations.

The author of the monograph Reforging the Iron Cross: The Search for Tradition in the German Armed Forces (Princeton, 1988), his recent publications have appeared in the Oxford Companion to Military History (2000) (NATO and German military history) as well as in Orbis 46, no.1 (winter 2002) and the Hoover Institution Digest (winter/spring 2003) on the evolution of NATO policy and strategy from a historical perspective.

Prior to his role at CCMR, he consulted with the strategic directorates of the army and navy staffs, as well as with the Office of Net Assessment of the U.S. Department of Defense.

He lectures widely in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and has been interviewed by such international media as Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, Die Zeit, and the Los Angeles Times on questions of contemporary policy and strategy. Abenheim is a member of the Clausewitz Society, the professional association of officers of the German general staff. His present research concerns wars of ideology, paramilitary organizations, and genocide in the twentieth century.

Before the completion of his doctoral studies, he was a civilian staff member of U.S. Army, Europe, as a liaison to the Bundeswehr in alliance burden sharing; an archivist at the Hoover Institution focusing on Germany in the twentieth century; and a museum curator at the Presidio of San Francisco on the U.S. Army with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and military regalia.

He received a Ph.D. degree in European history from Stanford University in 1985.